Fifteen Minutes

Fifteen Minutes

    That amount of time --fifteen minutes-- was the phrase Andy Warhol put to everyday fame saying that within our lifetimes each of us would have our fifteen minutes of fame.  Of course, some people have much more than that, and once in the spotlight, some of them often want more.  For others, being in the spotlight is unimportant.  Their work, whether charitable to altruistic, has no need for public recognition or reward.  And we all know such people...the anonymous donor, the exhausted volunteer who never complains, the caretaker, the animal lover, the dedicated researcher, the teacher, the nurse, and on and on.  Truth be told, we see more givers and heroes right beside us in our daily lives, far more than we see on the entertainment and media shows.  And sometimes, that local person (maybe you) becomes famous...business booms or a book is published or a life is saved.  And before our eyes, fifteen minutes is moving into an hour, then a day, then a year...

   This happened to Mandy Lee Canton, a writer who blogs and does so from her home in Vancouver, BC.  She published: an article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year. "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This."  And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer.   So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes.  So here are a couple of sample questions.   Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?  Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?... Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met.
 
    Her article got picked up online, and suddenly, her viewing traffic on her blog went from 500+ to 5400+ within a few days, then shot up 58,000 in another day.  Then The Today Show and Good Morning America interviewed her and her views jumped to 8,000,000.  She giddily talks about this on TED.  And her reaction is likely one most of us would have, whether you're a blogger or a nightclub singer or an inventor or whatever.  That dream moment, that moment of "being discovered" somehow lingers in the back of many of us.  We might feel that our talents, our intelligence, our goodness, our graciousness, are all going relatively unnoticed, or perhaps not as noticed as we would like.

    But there's another side to this.  For sometimes, with fame (in whatever form or however you view it), comes the unexpected.  As just one example, jump back to author Cathrynne M. Valente (whom I wrote about a few posts ago).  Her blog was/is a simple, if extensive, one.  And then, fame.  Here's how she puts in (you can view the entire diatribe on her concurrent blog):  In the nearly ten years of this blog's existence, I have employed what one might generously call a laissez-faire style of moderation.  I have deleted spam and threats to my person--and nothing else...I have felt that allowing the commenters to police the comment space was the best policy, because the content of the comments, in my ethical worldview, belongs to the commenters, and I believed it was not within my rights to remove their work even for the most egregious of offenses...I can count on one hand the number of people I have banned and comments I have deleted.  On the same hand.  I've always said: this is an open space.  Don't make me sorry for keeping it that way.  Well, it's finally happened.  Ten years was a good run, but I have been made sorry and things are going to change...I'm going to have to stop pretending that this is still a personal, intimate blog shared with a few of my friends.  It is not 2003.  Time to start acting like a grown-up internet girl and accept that this blog is widely read, and by a lot of people who haven't been here since day one.

   So she set down some rules: If you act a fool, I will let people make fun of you.  If, for a wild, random example, on a post about how women are not taken seriously and often threatened when they speak online, you decide to treat me like a bleating little girl and say that my post has been elevated to relevance only by a man's notice of it, I will let people take you down like a JV quarterback at the Super Bowl.  Because it illustrates a point, I will not freeze or delete it unless it gets out of hand--but a long, long leash will be given to those handling a commenter who proves the thesis of the post.  People like to feel like they can do something about injustice and assorted malicious stupidity.  If you give them a target, I will let them take their shots.  It's called catharsis.  Don't make yourself a vessel for other people's catharsis.  It's not good for your health. 

   And her blog rules go on and on.  But if it sounds a bit harsh, try to view her side of being read by millions: I will now treat the comments section of this blog as a high-stakes game of Whack-a-Troll.  Users will be banned.   I have only banned two users in the decade of this blog.  Both threatened me with rape and demonstrated knowledge of my whereabouts such that I took them seriously.  You will not have to go nearly this far to get banned any longer.  I take to heart Tiger Beatdown's philosophy of "Every comment on this blog is an audition."  Repeated offenses of the above (or below) variety will get you banned. Stalking or otherwise harassing other commenters will get you banned.  If you behave toward me in such a fashion that the mere sight of your username causes me anxiety, you will be banned with extreme prejudice.  I am not going to take your fee fees into account anymore.  My peace of mind is more important than your right to talk in my space.

    A recent piece in ELLE by Lizzy Goodman echoed the thought of just finding yourself: David Foster Wallace once explained his disinclination to discuss his substance abuse and recovery as coming from a recognition that the things he had to say about the subject were so depressingly quotidian.  So regular.  So akin, really, to bad, flat writing.  That's on my mind as I try to explain what happened in my late twenties, the way my perception of what mattered, what I wanted, and who I was began to turn to dust.  I'm not addicted to drugs or alcohol, but you might describe me as a recovering good girl.  I'd done everything that was asked of me, achieved everything I was supposed to.  And yet I was miserable.  I was in a permanent everything-everywhere-is-ending kind of mood. And it is. "We are stardust," you know?...To paraphrase Carrie Fisher's alter ego in Postcards From the Edge, I looked at my life and recognized so much of it as good, but I couldn't feel any of it.  The sickening sense of waste that realization engendered got me questioning pretty much everything.  Why did I care about the things I cared about?  Who taught me that they mattered?  Why did I listen?  Which isn't to suggest that I was ready to endorse an across-the-board repudiation of A+ seeking and exercising and Western society in general.  It's not that simple.  Much of what I'd done in my life did matter to me, but some of it really didn't.  But which was which?  I wanted to press PAUSE on the universe and sit down cross-legged somewhere with a giant mug of coffee and some snacks and methodically examine, one by one, each moment in my life and ask who'd been in charge of it, me or someone else—and if the latter, did I like the direction in which I'd been set? 

   There's the age-old phrase, "Be Careful What You Wish For."  And sometimes, as with what Lizzy Goodman wrote, we might have to ask if what we want is really what we want, and is it because we were told that we wanted it or was it really our own inner voice?  The lines often blur, and sometimes it is simply a matter of aging that quiets the din in the back so that you can hear your own voice.  Meditation of sorts.  But sometimes it is even deeper.  If fame and the spotlight is what we want, we might want to ask why?  And if going it alone is what we want, we might also want to ask why.  And somewhere among the endless questions, perhaps on our final breath, we might understand that the answer was always there, just buried deep inside.